It became part of our lives, my mother reciting Kaddish for the memory of Jakob Daw.
My father would prepare breakfast; David and I would help. “Stubborn woman, your mother,” he would say often in his courteous and respectful way. “She was stubborn when I knew her twenty years ago and she’s just as stubborn today.” David and I would leave for school, sometimes together, sometimes separately. Then my father would leave for his office, most often by subway, at times taking the car.
In a corridor in the school one day I overheard some talk, and on a cold gray morning soon afterward I left the house early and followed my mother to the synagogue. An icy wind blew along the parkway. The building seemed to be empty; it was more than an hour before the start of school. The front double door yielded to my push. My footsteps echoed in the empty hallway. I opened the door to the large room that was the synagogue and stopped. The room was empty.
I stood in the doorway and stared into the room. The ninon curtain was gone. Rows of neatly arranged empty chairs filled the room. The ark with its Torah scrolls stood unseen behind a high plywood wall, which enabled the room to be used for secular purposes, such as school assemblies, a rehearsal hall, and graduation ceremonies. I had forgotten for the moment that the room was not used as a synagogue on school days.
Where was my mother?
I came back out into the central hallway and listened. The building was silent. I walked up and down the floors and corridors of the school, listening. I heard nothing. Then I went quickly downstairs to the basement, pushed open a heavy metal door, and heard immediately the murmur of chanted prayers.
Adjacent to the furnace room was a small room, its door open. About a dozen men sat in wooden folding chairs, praying. This was the weekday minyan, which met early so as to enable the men to get to their jobs on time. At the lectern stood a roundish man whom I immediately recognized as Mr. Helfman. A small ark stood against the wall that faced the lectern. The room was painted a pale green and lit by a small dusty ceiling fixture. The air smelled of furnace heat and damp earth. In a dark corner rested what looked like a slanting bamboo wall. I glanced quickly around and did not see my mother.
I went back along the corridor to the metal door. Then I stopped and stood still a moment and turned and went back to the room, a queer pounding in my chest. Inside the room I went silently behind the last row of chairs and peered behind the bamboo wall. There, on a single chair, her back to the wall, sat my mother, a prayerbook in her hands. She wore a dark blue beret and a dark blue woolen dress. Her coat was draped over the back of the chair. There was little light and she was bent over the prayer-book.
I stood very still, staring at her.
Then she sensed my presence and glanced up. A look of astonishment filled her eyes. “Ilana?” she whispered.
“What’s wrong?”
“Mama? Why are—?”
I heard people rising from their chairs. My mother rose and stood quietly as one of the closing prayers of the service was said. Mr. Helfman repeated the last words of the prayer. A number of the men began to recite the Kaddish. My mother stood behind the bamboo wall and said the Kaddish in a clear, steady voice that was audible throughout the small room. She said it once more in that same clear, steady voice before the service came to an end.
My mother put the prayerbook on the chair and picked up her coat. I followed her through the room. A few of the men nodded at her; most remained impassive; one looked visibly annoyed.
Mr. Helfman said, “Good morning, Ilana. Aren’t you up early? Is everything all right?”
I nodded, feeling my face hot and my heart pounding.
In the corridor I said, “Mama, why are you sitting like that?”
“It’s all right, darling. They didn’t want to build a wall just for me. Someone found that piece of bamboo.”
“It’s like being in a prison.”
“What else can I do? They didn’t want me there at all. With the bamboo wall they can have their service, as long as I stay out of sight.”
I said to my father that night, “Is that the law, Papa?”
“Yes, llana. That’s the law.” “I think the law isn’t decent.”
He gave me a patient smile. “Let me explain something to you, Ilana. We pray separately as a group. If there were no separation between men and women, the men would not be able to hold a service. And then no one would be able to say Kaddish. Women don’t have to pray because they’re involved in family responsibilities. It’s your mother’s choice, Ilana. The men were very decent to put up the bamboo. That solved the problem and enables your mother to say Kaddish.”
I raised the issue in my Hebrew class. The teacher, Mr. Margolis, was tall, middle-aged, clean-shaven, with fleshy cheeks and a paunch. He wore a dark suit and tie. Across his vest, in two roller coaster loops from pocket to button to pocket, rode the gleaming chain of his pocket watch, which he regularly pulled out, snapped open, consulted, and put back. On his thick dark hair was a tall dark skullcap. He listened to me patiently and said, “What do you want them to do, Ilana? Let your mother sit in the same room with the men?”
I nodded.
A murmur rose from my classmates. Shocked eyes stared at me. Ruthie, three seats to my right, threw me a startled look.
“That’s the way all the Reformers and the Conservatives sit,” Mr. Margolis said sternly. “Such a synagogue is not a holy place, and we may not pray in it. It is a Christianized synagogue. Do you want us to become like the Conservatives and the Reformed?”
It was not a question that required an answer. I sat very still at my desk and said nothing. How they all stared at me! My heart pounded and my throat was dry.
At the end of the class he asked me to stay behind for a moment. I came up to his desk as the others were filing out for the afternoon recess in the yard, some of them glancing at me pityingly. When we were alone, he said, “I tell you this directly, Ilana. You are probably my best student. Don’t cause trouble in class. You will set a bad example for the others.”
I stood in front of his desk, frightened.
“Tell me, who is your mother saying Kaddish for?”
“Jakob Daw.”
“How were they related?”
“They were good friends.”
“They were not related?”
“No.”
He looked at me out of narrow eyes. “Where did your mother know him?”
“In Europe. In Vienna. They went to school together. And he was in America awhile.”
“Ah, yes. Now I remember. Jakob Daw. The writer who was deported.”
“Yes.”
“You knew him too?”
“He was like an uncle to me. I loved him.”
Mr. Margolis was silent a long moment, looking at me intently. Then he lightly cleared his throat and said, “Listen to me, Ilana. Everywhere in the world, wherever you go, there are rules and laws. If we did not have rules and laws there would be anarchy. Do you know what anarchy is? This school has rules and laws. No one here forces you to come to this school. But once you do come, you must obey the rules and the laws. You are a very good student, but your head will not help you if you do not understand the rules and the laws. In a year and a half you will graduate. There are awards and prizes. Keep up your good work and we will all be proud of you. Do I make myself clear? Good. Very good. Now you can go and join your friends.”
I had learned a strange lesson: walls are laws to some people, and laws are walls to others.
I went out of the room and did not again talk to anyone in that school about the cage in which my mother daily sat to say Kaddish for Jakob Daw.
We were studying the Book of Genesis, the stories of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs. That was the winter of early 1941, when German planes were daily bombing England, and Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his third term as President of the United States.
I loved the stories in Genesis. Mr. Margolis taught slowly and with some impatience. We were studying the Hebr
ew text along with the commentary of Rashi, a great French rabbi who lived in the period of the First Crusade. Always I got myself ready for class by studying the text in advance, even when Mr. Margolis did not assign it. I had learned that method of study from David, who always prepared in advance whatever page of Talmud would be studied next by his class.
We were in the twelfth chapter of Genesis. God tells Abraham—Abram was his name at the time—to leave his country and the place of his birth and his father’s house for a distant land. Abraham journeys with his household to the land of Canaan. There he travels as far as a site called Shechem. And the text says, “The Canaanites were then in the land.”
Mr. Margolis wanted to know if there was any problem in that verse with the Hebrew word oz, then.
He stood behind his desk, tall and dark, one finger in a pocket of his vest, waiting.
No one said anything.
Eyes stared at the Hebrew word. Who paid attention to a small word like that? Oz. Then. “The Canaanites were then in the land.” I had gone over the text before class but had not thought to stop on the meaning of that word.
Then. At that time. That’s what it meant. At the time when Abraham came to Shechem there were Canaanites in the land. But why did we have to be told that? Obviously there were Canaanites in the land. It was called the land of Canaan.
“I want you to think about it,” Mr. Margolis said.
I raised my hand.
“Ilana.”
“Rashi says the Canaanites were conquering the land from the children of Shem.” “Very good, Ilana.”
“But if the Canaanites were conquering the land from the children of Shem, why was it called the land of Canaan?”
He stood tall and dark behind his desk, fingering his pocket watch, and looked at me. “What should it have been called, Ilana?”
“The land of Shem.”
“The land of Shem.” He looked down at the open Bible on his desk and scanned the Rashi. The top of his skullcap formed a dark shiny satin moon as it caught and reflected the winter sunlight that came through the windows. Steam hissed softly in the silver-painted radiators. There were cracks in the pale green walls and flaking paint on the white ceiling. The room was overheated. Oz. Then. What could that little word mean? Clearly the then of the story was the time of Abraham. But, again, why did we have to be reminded that there were Canaanites in the land of Canaan? Perhaps—perhaps—
Something hung elusively on the edge of thought, but I could not grasp it and it was gone.
Mr. Margolis looked up from the Bible on his desk and gave the class a thin smile. “Ilana asks a good question. Why was it not called the land of Shem if, according to Rashi, the Canaanites were not actually living there but were conquering it?”
Along the periphery of my vision I saw Ruthie raise her hand.
“Ruth?”
“Maybe the Canaanites were living in it a long time already and were still trying to conquer the rest of it.”
Mr. Margolis’s thin smile widened. “Very good, Ruth. Very good. The Canaanites had no doubt been living in it a long time already. Like America. It was called America even while Americans were still conquering the west. Very good, Ruthie.”
Ruthie, her face suddenly a shade of high color that accentuated her freckles, looked astonished at having stumbled upon the answer wanted by Mr. Margolis.
I talked about the verse during supper with my father, and he said Ruthie’s explanation made sense to him. David said there couldn’t be any other explanation. My mother sat at the table looking very tired and said nothing. Her early risings to get to the synagogue, her half-days at work, her journeys to the synagogue for the afternoon and evening service—all had put her in a state of permanent fatigue.
Later I lay in my bed reading a novel my mother had taken out for me from the Brooklyn Public Library on Eastern Parkway. On the other side of the hallway, David was softly studying Talmud in his room, the chanting reaching me through the walls that separated us. I thought again of the word and looked up from the novel at the harp that hung on the back of the door. It lay in the shadows cast by the bed lamp. Suppose Jakob Daw had used that word in a sentence in one of his stories. What would it mean? I tried to imagine it in his story about the bird who went wandering through the world in search of the source of the world’s music. Suppose it left its land, its flock, its nest, and found a land of tall hills and fertile valleys. And suppose Jakob Daw had then said, There were Canaanites then in the land. What would that mean? It would mean—it would mean that at the time Jakob Daw was telling me the story—or was writing the story—there weren’t any Canaanites in the land. And if it was important for my understanding of the story that I know of the existence of Canaanites in the past, he would have to remind me of it. And he would do that by saying or writing, There were Canaanites then in the land.
What was that? Had a wooden ball lifted of itself and fallen upon a string of the harp? Had the birds stirred? I was in a dream, of course. I had drifted off to sleep for a moment and had been in a dream. I put the book on the night table, removed my glasses, and snapped off the light.
The last thing I thought I heard as I slid into sleep was the faint singing of the harp blending with the quiet music of the Talmud that came from David’s room.
The next day I raised my hand in Mr. Margolis’s class and waited to be called.
“Yes, llana.”
“May I go back to yesterday and give another explanation of oz?”
“Of course.”
We had been on a difficult verse. I could sense the class relaxing all around me. My mouth was dry, my heart beat loudly.
“Oz can mean that at the time this story was written down, there were no longer any Canaanites in the land; and the writer of the story is reminding the reader that at the time the story took place there were Canaanites, because Canaanites are important to the story.”
Mr. Margolis stood very still behind his desk, gazing at me. He asked me to repeat my explanation.
I repeated it, slowly, my heart thumping wildly. Why was he looking at me like that?
He said, solemnly, “You mean to say, Ilana, that a writer wrote this story?”
“Yes.”
“And who was this writer?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. And when did he write this story?”
“When there were no longer any Canaanites in the land.”
“There were always Canaanites in the land, Ilana.”
“When there were no longer any Canaanites near Shechem.” The room was strangely hushed, as if all had long ceased breathing.
“Ilana,” Mr. Margolis said, after a pause that seemed endless, “we do not study the Torah this way here.” I sat very still, my heart thundering.
“God wrote the Torah,” Mr. Margolis said. “Not a writer. God. It’s the holy word of God. Do you understand?”
I had never seen him so dark and stern. He seemed to be growing in darkness before my eyes.
“If people wrote the Torah, why should we bother with it? Why should we sacrifice ourselves for it? Why should we read it in shul every Shabbos and yom-tov? Why should we be willing to die for it? God spoke every single word of the Torah to Moses, who wrote it all down, every word. Even his own death Moses described, with tears running down his face.”
He paused for a moment and took a breath, then went on. “The Torah is not stories, Ilana. The Torah is not a piece of make-believe. It is not like Shakespeare or like—what is his name?—James Joyce or like your good friend Jakob Daw. The Torah is God’s stories. God’s! The truth of God. The eternal truth given to us by the Master of the Universe. Rashi has the correct understanding of the verse. And that is the way we will learn it here. I want you to think about that, Ilana. I want you to remember that. All right? Very good. Now let us continue reading.”
I sat in a pall of confusion and shame and heard nothing of what went on for all the rest of the day in that class.
My father had an English commentary in his library in the living room. I went to it that evening after supper. The commentary was by a modern English rabbi named J. H. Hertz. I found the verse and read the commentary:
the Canaanite was then in the land—i.e., was already in the land. ‘Before the age of Abraham, the Canaanites had already settled in the lowlands of Palestine—Canaan, be it noted, signified Lowlands’ (Sayce). The interpretation of this verse as meaning that the Canaanites were at that time in the land, but were no longer so at the time when Genesis was written (an interpretation which misled even Ibn Ezra), is quite impossible. The Canaanites formed part of the population down to the days of the later kings.
I read it again.
Ibn Ezra, I knew, was one of the greatest of the Jewish commentators of the Middle Ages. He had been born in Spain and wandered throughout Europe. I had ventured a guess—and had come up with Ibn Ezra’s answer! I wondered how Ibn Ezra would have responded to Mr. Margolis’s questions. Would Ibn Ezra have sacrificed himself for the Torah? I couldn’t understand why Mr. Margolis seemed fearful of there being more than one way to understand the meaning of the Torah. Was he afraid he would lose control over our thinking? Why did he need to control the way we thought? Did he believe that God wrote stories with only one kind of meaning? It seemed to me that a story that had only one kind of meaning was not very interesting or worth remembering for too long.
The harp sounded muted that evening as I came into my room and sat down at my desk to my homework. I looked at it, wondering if something was wrong with its strings. Across the hallway from me David softly sang his talmudic music. In the living room my parents were listening to a symphony on the phonograph. Outside an icy wind moaned in the trees, rustling bare branches in a sad music of its own.
Winter slipped away. The days grew warm. Trees began to bud. Mr. Helfman planted his garden.
That spring of 1941 was a dream time for me, an idyll, the loveliest time of my young life. I felt untouched by Europe and its war, freed of the dark burden of politics and history. My body was changing. There were long, shy, intimate conversations with girls in my class about boys, menstruation, brassiere sizes, clothing styles. Some of the girls seemed ashamed of their growing breasts. Boys began to look at me in awkward masculine ways.